Only that unlike COBOL, or VB, or the likes, it doesn't use English-like keywords thinking it will make the language "easier to read", but use concepts that are used in spoken language. This way, when you speak fluent Perl, you can express yourself better, and not just "do more".

I wish I'd said that.

No. Ireally mean it! I really wish that I had had the language skills or insight to have constructed those two sentences.

It bugs me intensely when I see the posts around here that condemn, eschew, and deprecate the power of Perl's notation in favour of some hamstrung subset of lowest denominator commonality or CS-theoretically correct formality.

For all the hype about CPAN, this is Perl's strength. So much of CPAN wastes space, time and cycles re-implementing Perl's built-in power, to 'correct' its non-orthogonality, or to 'make it OO-compliant'. And in the process, completely miss the reasons that make Perl uniquely powerful for expressing solutions to complex problems in productively concise and intuatively simple terms.

Java and its libraries are extremely complete and powerful. Java's problem is that it takes so long to express the high level concepts that denote the algorithm you are trying to code, that you loose your way in all the low-level detail that it forces you to state explicitely and verbosely

The beauty of Perl is that it allows you to say: "He'll process all the data", not "My assistant, John, 34, from Popocatepetl, married with 3 children, will go through all the data, starting from record one, and working his (John's) way through sequentially, record by record, until he has processed all the records!".

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

Ada Lovelace for the palindrome
Albert Einstein for having smelly feet
Alfred Nobel for his contribution to battlefield science
Burkhard Heim for providing the missing link between science and mysticism
Claude Shannnon for riding a unicycle at night at MIT
Donald Knuth for being such a great organist
Edward Teller for being the template for Dr. Strangelove
Edwin Hubble for pretending to be a pipe-smoking English gentleman
Erwin Schrödinger for cruelty to cats
Hedy Lamarr for weaponizing pianos
Hugh Everett for immortality, especially for cats
Isaac Newton for his occult studies
Kikunae Ikeda for discovering the secrets of soy sauce
Larry Wall for his website
Louis Camille Maillard for discovering why steaks taste good
Marie Curie for the shiny stuff
Nikola Tesla for the cool cars
Paul Dirac for speaking one word per hour when socializing
Richard Feynman for his bongo skills
Robert Oppenheimer for his in-depth knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita
Rusi P Taleyarkhan for Cold Fusion
Sigmund Freud for his Ménage ā trois
Theodor W Adorno for his contribution to the reception of jazz
Wilhelm Röntgen for the foundations of body scanners
Yulii Borisovich Khariton for the Tsar Bomba
Other (please explain why)